8. You have taught me to value a good night's sleep over all else including adventures of love and friendship, and even when the night is charged with magic, to be sure to get to bed. If God had not meant everyone to be in bed by ten-thirty, He would never have provided the ten o'clock newscast.

9. You taught me to be nice, so that now I am full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no passion. "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all," you said, so I am very quiet, which most people think is politeness. I call it repression.

10. You taught me to worry about my face. The fear of acne, which will follow me to my grave, began when I was fourteen, a time of life when a person has no skin but is all raw flesh (skin-colored), and grew a crop of zits around my nose and learned various positions, sitting and standing, in which I could keep a hand to my face. They were triggered by fear. You said, "I'd like you to have a nice complexion for Dorothy and Bob's wedding. They'll be taking pictures." So I wound up looking like a three-bean salad. I died inside to see myself in the mirror. Better that those blotches meant nose cancer; at least I could go to the hospital and get flowers. What I had, people don't send flowers for. When I was sixteen, I bought the first ski mask in town. "Why don't you smile more?" you said.

11. You taught me "When the going gets tough, the tough get going," teaching me to plod forward in the face of certain doom.

12. You taught me to be competitive even in matters of faith, to take pride in the great privilege of having been born Lutheran, even at moments of contrition. Religious intolerance was part of our faith. We believed Catholics were illiterate peasants, foreign-born, who worshiped idols. In Sunday School, we looked up to see a gory picture of "Christian Infants Martyred at the Hands of Papist Clergy." We believed there was a secret tunnel between rectory and nunnery. We believed they poisoned the pets of Protestants. Whatever they believed, it wasn't right.

13. In place of true contrition, you taught me to be apologetic. I apologize continually. I apologize for my own existence, a fact that I cannot change. For years, you told me I'd be sorry someday. I am.

14. You taught me to trust my own incompetence and even now won't let me mash potatoes without your direct supervision. "Don't run the mixer so fast that you get them all over," you say, as if in my home, the walls are covered with big white lumps. I can't mow a lawn or hang tinsel on a Christmas tree or paint a flat surface in your presence without you watching, worried, pointing out the unevenness.

15. You taught me an indecent fear of sexuality. I'm not sure I have any left underneath this baked-on crust of shame and disgust. For years I worried because my penis hangs slightly to the left, and finally read in a book that this is within the realm of the normal, but then wondered, What sort of person would read books like that?

Hey, Doug, are you going to post all 95? Whatever happened to copyright restrictions?!

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
Hey, Doug, are you going to post all 95? Whatever happened to copyright restrictions?!

Yes.

I'm throwing caution to the wind!

16. You have provided me with poor male role models, including the Sons of Knute, the Boosters Club and others whose petulance, inertia, and ineptitude are legendary. I was taught to respect them: men who clung to tiny grudges for decades and were devoted to vanity, horsefeathers, small potatoes--not travel but the rites of trunk-loading and map-reading and gas mileage; not faith but the Building Committee; not love but supper.

17. Listening to them, I was taught to keep quite. Stupidity had the floor, always. Argument was impolite.

18. You instilled in me a paralyzing nostalgia for a time before I was born, a time when men were men and women were saintly, and children were obedient, industrious, asked no luxuries, entertained themselves, and knew right from wrong. I, on the other hand, was a symptom of everything going to hell in a handbasket. I was left to wonder why I bothered to be born.

19. You brought me up to respect fastidiousness as incarnate value, Christianity made evident. As a tiny child, I lined up my string beans in a row on the plate, taking exactly three per bite. I hesitated to eat the mashed potatoes, lest the little gravy lake spill. I kept useless collections of stamps, seashells, postcards, rocks, delighting in their deadly neatness. In our home, all surfaces were meant to be bare, emptiness was the ideal. The fear of dust (amathophobia) was endemic. One little book lying on the floor: "This house is a mess. Why can't you ever put things back when you're done with them?" We were passionate about snow-shoveling and made nice even banks. In summer, I edged the lawn, trimmed around trees, attacked dandelions. When Grandpa died, we tended his grave zealously, kneeling at the stone to landscape his resting place. "He was a good man," someone said once in the cemetery. "Ja," you said. "I've been thinking a little Turf-Builder. And maybe a fungicide."

Attacked dandelions!

What are they teaching this kid?